


The Protector

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Monty's Book of Lost Souls [2]
Category: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Series - Mackenzi Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Blood and Injury, God of Wine, Goddess of Medicine, Gods, Gun Violence, Guns, Justice, Muse of Music, Shooting, Wine, or are they original?, stay tuned next fic for the identity of the narrator, the shooter gets what's coming to him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24419404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Hello again.  I don’t know if you remember, but… I told you a story, once.  I didn’t tell you my name, so maybe you don’t remember.  Sorry about that, but it still doesn’t matter all that much.  Who I am really isn’t important....Aka the narrator is back, and he has another story to tell.
Relationships: Henry "Monty" Montague/Percy Newton
Series: Monty's Book of Lost Souls [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763023
Comments: 10
Kudos: 9
Collections: TGGTVAV AU Challenge Fics





	The Protector

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely based on the Pulse Nightclub shooting. Someone described this idea as catharsis, "like reimagining a nightmare with a better ending". I hope I've done it justice.

_Hello again. I don_ _’t know if you remember, but… I told you a story, once. I didn’t tell you my name, so maybe you don’t remember. Sorry about that, but it still doesn’t matter all that much. Who I am really isn’t important._

_Anyway. To the point. Last time I was here I told you a story about a lost queer kid who was having a hard time. That was me, that was my story. It began with a bottle of wine poured into the ditch at the side of the road and ended with a wedding and a wave. And in that story was another story, the story of the God of Lost Souls and the Muse of Music, recounted exactly as it was recounted to me._

_I thought, at the time, that I_ _’d finished telling all the things that needed to be told. The stories were done, weren’t they? But then one day not too long ago I was sitting with my husband and I_ saw _him—the God of Lost Souls. He was on the news, all lit up, standing tall in a godly form that I had never seen before. I was so used to the short, ratty guy with the blond hair and the dimples that I almost didn_ _’t recognize him. Not until he spoke, and then it came slamming into me all at once that even though MY story was over,_ his _most certainly was not. And the people he helped, their stories? God, mine was only a drop in that bucket._

 _It was then and there, sitting on the couch with my hands over my mouth, watching reels of phone footage on the news as my husband held me, that I realized I needed to tell the rest. I was a thousand years too late to tell the beginning, and he_ _’ll be here helping people another hundred thousand years after I’m dead and gone, but for as long as I live, as long as I can, I will find the people who met the God of Lost Souls—Monty—and I will share their stories, starting with this one. This one, which comes from the mouth of the thirty-two-year-old woman who summoned Monty to a certain nightclub the night it came—literally—under fire._

 _I_ _’ll record it exactly as she told it._

***

My name is *** *******. I met him six days ago. 

I… look, I’ve heard the stories people tell about summoning him. They say that he always appears just when you think it didn’t work, and always introduces himself by name. He’s known for always knowing your name before you introduce yourself, too—every story I’ve ever heard about him, that’s how it goes. But mine…

…it wasn’t like that.

I was with a date. A shitty date, actually. She was nice over chat, but the moment we met up I knew we weren’t going to click. She was just… kind of stuck up, I guess? I don’t know. She made fun of me for asking the bartender for a cup of wine because I don’t like liquor. Like she was trying to be teasing but it was actually just mean, you know? But I figured I’d stick it out for the night and if she was really that bad I would break it off in the morning.

So we were dancing, and I was holding my wine in one hand. We were there early, but not too early, and soon enough everything was in full swing. So many people… it was a popular night, a Friday night, with a lot of people, you know… and I… I’m sorry.

…

…Okay, okay. I’m okay. It just hit me how many people could have died? Like I knew he saved a lot of lives, but there were _so many people there_. I know a few people didn’t—didn’t make it, but it could have been _so much worse_.

Sorry, sorry, I’m off track. I—where was I? 

In the crowd. I was in the crowd. Kind of—I was at the back of one of the rooms on the lower floor, kind of backed up against one of the tables back there. My date was in front of me. We were dancing. She was kind of—it’s funny, but she was so _pushy_. She nearly pushed me over the table at least twice.

It was hard to tell at first that something had changed. It was dark, and the lights were strobing, and the music was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think, and—the people, I couldn’t see around the people, but suddenly my date was pushed up right against me and I could see people at her back pushing into _her_ and—I got this glimpse of people absolutely pouring out of one of the hallways. Like a panic, a stampede, and people were on the floor and the DJ stand was getting pushed over and the DJ was back there yelling and—and then I heard the gunshots.

It was madness. There were people everywhere. People pushing toward the tables in the back to hide, people pushing for the front hallway to run, people screaming and tripping each other up and I’d already lost my date in the crowd but I stopped thinking about her because I just wanted to follow the crowd and _get out_ , you know? 

But I couldn’t. I realized I couldn’t when there was this flash of light and another bang, and I realized the shooter was in the room with us. I did the only thing I could think of—I hid under the table, pushing back toward the wall. 

And that’s when it happened. It was the wine—the wine that my date made fun of me for. 

I didn’t even notice I still had my cup in my hand. Most of the wine had sloshed out but there was still a little bit in the bottom and I was holding onto it so tight that the plastic was crinkling. More gunshots, and the last of the crowd had bottlenecked at the hallway out and I saw the shooter looking around as he fired into the crowd and I saw someone fall and I just—I didn’t even realize I was speaking. The music was still so loud, I… I couldn’t hear myself. I squeezed the cup and the last of the wine ran over my fingers and wrist and onto the floor and I was pleading, just going ‘please please please’ over and over and—

And just as the shooter turned his head toward me, there was this… it was like a pressure in the room, I guess. Like that feeling you get when your ears suddenly need to pop. And I blinked and suddenly—suddenly he was there. Standing behind the shooter, towering over him, another figure like a shadow behind him. And I had this random thought of ‘ _holy shit, I need to record this_ ’. So I pulled out my phone—my hands were shaking so _bad_ —and hit the button for the camera and—

***

_Here she pulled out her phone to show me. The casing was scorched and the screen was cracked, but it came alive under her touch. She navigated to a video and set it on the table for me to see._

_The video was hard to see at first. The lights were still strobing, the spaces in between as dark as the depths of the ocean. There was music playing, almost vibrating in the phone_ _’s microphone. Then, slowly, the shadows began to take shape, illuminated by a blue glow._

 _I recognized Monty from the footage I saw on the news. He was tall, much taller than the shooter, who barely came up to his stomach. The camera was focused at first on the shooter, Monty almost hidden behind him, and Percy—though I didn_ _’t realize it at the time—hidden behind him in turn._

_It was hard to see, but as the video played I began to pick out clothes. Monty was clad in a dark, billowing shirt and tight pants that shone and shimmered under that odd blue light, like they were made of some dark liquid—wine, perhaps—wine or blood—that had turned solid._

_I watched in awe as the video jerked, rising slowly to capture his chest, and his shoulders, and, finally, his head. The head that was brushing the rows of lights hanging from the ceiling._

_I can_ _’t describe to you the feeling that came over me to see his face. Hopefully I can describe the visual instead, and you can perhaps draw your own conclusions._

 _His light hair was chin-length. It was whipping about him as if it were caught in the wind. And his face_ _… god. His face was three pinpricks of blue flame, eyes and mouth illuminated as if he was lit from the inside, as if he had no organs or bones and was instead crafted from a raging blue fire that was barely contained by a thin casing of skin._

 _This_ _… this was his full godly form. A far cry from the ragged human form he had always taken when he came to see me._

_I stared. Watched. With an awe that had me cemented to my chair. I realized, later, that the shadow behind him was Percy, his musical influence there as the music of the club seemed to pulse in time with the flames as Monty stared down the shooter, but the first time I watched the full video my focus was on Monty and Monty alone._

_Monty, who didn_ _’t so much as flinch as the shooter screamed and opened fire, shooting point blank into Monty’s chest, the flashes of light offset from the beat of the music._

_“Wow,” I said._

_“Yeah. I was crying,” *** said. “But I didn’t—I couldn’t—stop recording.”_

_I_ _’m so glad she didn’t. Because the next part… the next part was what had convinced me to pursue this story. It had been cut up into more palatable pieces for TV, but the full thing… whoa. Just whoa._

_The beginning of the end began when Monty, still under fire, raised one glowing hand and placed it on the muzzle of the gun._

_It whited out the camera for a moment, the blue flames so bright that they seemed to swallow the darkness in its entirety. When the camera came back into focus the strobe lights had stopped, and the music had cut out, and the shooter stood, hands bare, shaking, before the God._

_I knew what happened. In my head, I knew it. I_ _’d heard it on the news—Monty had seared the gun with a flash of heat so intense that it turned to ashy dust in the shooter’s hands. But to see the gun there one moment and gone the next… I could hardly believe it._

 _My mouth was hanging open as there was silence on the video. The lack of sound felt like an echo—like it was reverberating across my empty house. And then_ _…_

 _“You… you’re… the god of lost souls. I called to you, but you never came,” the shooter said, his voice tinny from the speaker, full of anger. “I asked you to help me but you never—fucking—_ came _._ _”_

 _Monty_ _’s eyes blazed, an unending blue as he stared down at the shooter before him. The shooter lifted his chin in defiance._

 _“You left me to fester. Yet you come… for_ them _?_ _”_

 _…The final word was hardly out of his mouth when Monty’s hand flashed forward, seizing him by the throat and LIFTING. The shooter’s feet kicked in the air as Monty lifted him up, face to BURNING face, and said, speaking in a roar that echoed with the voices of lost souls departed, “You think you were_ lost _? You think you were a_ lost soul _? No. You were_ never _lost. Your isolation was a cage of your own making, crafted from the bitter hatred in your very own heart. I did not come because_ you are not mine _._ _”_

_And, just like that, the video ended in a pulse of blue light._

***

So… yeah. You watched the news—there was nothing left of him afterward. Just a bit of ash on the dance floor. 

I stayed under the table. I was in shock. I didn’t realize that I’d gripped my phone so hard that I’d cracked the screen. He stood there for… I don’t know, it must have been a few minutes. Not moving, not even breathing, as he looked at the destruction. Then from the hallway a woman came, her hands swirling with red energy. I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. But she… she just knelt by one of the people laying on the floor and leaned over them and I saw the energy, the magic or whatever streaking over their bloody face. A moment later, the person sat up and she moved on to the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

There were… there were a few that she didn’t touch. They were… gone. Already gone. Their bodies had taken too much damage, and they couldn’t… it was just too late. Monty had begun to move, following her and lingering at the ones she didn’t touch. He was so tall… and his fingers slid over their still faces, closing their eyes… and as he pulled back, I saw…

Look, it’s going to sound crazy. I didn’t even believe in this stuff until it happened. But I saw him pull back, and I saw a—a transparent shape follow his hand, like a smoky silhouette of a human figure. And I knew… somehow I knew it was a soul.

I was shaking. I felt kind of sick, like I was going to faint at any moment. I didn’t realize that I was staring at them from under the table, watching as she coaxed bullets out of wounds and he cradled souls to his chest, until suddenly there was someone in front of me. ‘My name is Percy,’ he said, and pushed down my hand and the phone in it. 

I tried to pull away. I’m not sure why. But then he began to hum something, some melody I had never heard before, and all the tension drained from me. I slumped forward into his arms and closed my eyes, and the next time I opened them I was lying in a hospital bed, no gods in sight, no sign that any of that had ever happened… nothing except my phone, lying on the table beside me.

I had only been out a few minutes, just long enough for an ambulance to take me from the club to the hospital, but there were already reporters clamoring all over me. The gods had disappeared, but everyone knew they’d been there—there was no other explanation for what happened. How else would everybody who was still alive have been miraculously healed?

…I learned the numbers later. Six people died. Six, plus the shooter, and then Monty stopped the rampage. 

And I… I kept thinking… who knows how many lives could have been lost if he hadn’t arrived when he did? I thought it was a miracle.

I didn’t realize until I went to wash my clothes and I found the wine stain on my shirt sleeve that I was the one who had called Monty there. 

***

_And that was it. That was the story. *** left my house that afternoon at three forty-six, taking her phone and the incredible video on it with her._

_I didn_ _’t expect to hear from her again. That’s why I was so confused when, just after midnight, my cell began to ring. I grabbed it, trying to silence it before it woke my husband up, and ended up answering it._

 _I didn_ _’t think to record the conversation. I was half-asleep, and it just didn’t occur to me. Still, I’ll recount it the best I can._

 _She started by telling me that she was drunk. She_ _’d been having some trouble sleeping since That Night, and the alcohol was to dull down the thoughts that had been keeping her awake night after night. It was kind of hard to understand her, she was talking so fast, but I caught a few details—like that she’d been drinking wine, and that she’d had the shooting on her mind._

 _She said that she_ _’d needed to thank him, thank Monty. Thank him for coming even though she hadn’t known she called._

 _I nodded along, asking what she_ _’d done. She said that she’d taken the last sip of her wine and poured it out into her bathtub, calling on Monty as she did._

 _She half expected that it wouldn_ _’t work. That he wouldn’t show up a second time, that the first had been a fluke. But I could tell—partly from the fact that she’d called, and partly from having known Monty for so many years—that he had. Of_ course _he had. Monty was a kind god—a kind_ person _. He wouldn_ _’t leave a lost soul hurting._

 _He_ _’d appeared in the hall outside the bathroom, she said, just when she thought he wasn’t going to appear. In human form, all five feet two inches of him. All trussed up in his torn jeans and his dusty hoodie and his fingerless gloves. And he’d been smiling, she said—showing two deep dimples, happy, like he’d been waiting for her call._

 _He said,_ _‘My name is Monty.’_

 _And he said,_ _‘I am the god of wine… the lover of the muse of music… and the keeper of lost souls.’_

 _And he said, a laugh in his voice,_ _‘yours was not the first divine butt-dial I’ve ever gotten…’_

_…_

_‘…But I am glad…_ so _glad_ _… that I picked up.’_


End file.
